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Email Anatomy for the Modern Marketer

If you’ve been in email marketing for any length of time, you know your email anatomy and the importance of your From name, subject line and preview text. But along comes mobile, and it slowly usurps the desktop as the inbox of choice.

The components of the modern email aren’t necessarily different on mobile but user-experience certainly is.

Email anatomy in the mobile inbox…

On the surface, it looks like mobile email anatomy is the same at the inbox with the:

From line

Subject line

Preview text

However, although these items are the same, they need to work a lot harder in the mobile environment. Keep in mind that email triage is being done on mobile devices. People like you and me, we clean up our inboxes before we sit down at our laptops or computers by whipping out our smart phones and deleting away. Our attention spans are already short. They are minuscule on mobile.

Therefore your From line must be even better than before, your subject line must be tested thoroughly to find the best for mobile, and your preview text has to rock. All three must grab attention and keep it to avoid the dreaded delete. Whatever you’re doing for the desktop version won’t be enough. Make mobile matter.

…and after the mobile open

When you’ve got those three items mastered and you get the open, you are then challenged to present your entire email content on a tiny screen. So what does that look like? You’ll have your:

Branding

Headline

Hero image

Body text

Call to action

No surprises there, right? Same as your desktop versions…except smaller, much smaller. As with the inbox, all of these components that make up your email anatomy have to be concise and compelling. You need to design for mobile, period. You need to be wary of the long scroll. Your image has to be just right. Your content has to grab and hold. Your offer has to be irresistible. Your call to action must be easily clickable. And…you’ll likely need a mobile optimized landing page to take them too given your limited space for your email.

Email anatomy on mobile is like a super condensed, stacked version of what’s on a desktop or laptop screen. You’re down to just the bare bones with mobile email. And that makes those bones matter more than ever.